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EMNLP Findings2025

Training Language Models to Critique With Multi-agent Feedback

Tian Lan, Wenwei Zhang, Chengqi Lyu, Shuaibin Li, Chen Xu, Heyan Huang, Dahua Lin, Xian-Ling Mao, Kai Chen

Abstract

Critique ability, a meta-cognitive capability of humans, presents significant challenges for LLMs to improve. While utilizing human annotation can enhance critique ability effectively, most recent works primarily rely on supervised fine-tuning (SFT) using critiques generated by a single LLM like GPT-4, which is more scalable and cost-effective. However, such modelgenerated critiques often suffer from inherent flaws due to the complexity of critique. Consequently, fine-tuning LLMs on these flawed critiques not only limits performance but also propagates errors into the learned model. To address this issue, we propose MultiCritique, a unified framework that leverages multi-agent feedback to improve critique ability in both the supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL) stages. In the SFT stage, MultiCritique aggregates high-quality multiagent critiques through a fine-grained metacritique mechanism. In the RL stage, preference critiques are constructed and refined by validating their contributions to revisions, thereby enhancing robustness of RL in improving critique ability. Based on MultiCritique, we construct SFT and RL datasets. Extensive experimental results on two benchmarks highlight the key benefits of our dataset, including superior quality, enhanced data efficiency, strong generalization on unseen tasks, and improvements in the general capability of LLMs. Notably, our fine-tuned 7B model significantly surpasses advanced 7B-13B models, approaching advanced 70B LLMs and GPT-4. Resources have been publicly available 1 .

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Cited by top-tier papers4

  1. Automatic Evaluation for Text-to-image Generation: Task-decomposed Framework, Distilled Training, and Meta-evaluation BenchmarkRong-Cheng Tu, Zi-Ao Ma, Tian Lan, Yuehao Zhao et al.ACL 2025 · 13 citations
  2. Taming Actor-Observer Asymmetry in Agents via Dialectical AlignmentBobo Li, Rui Wu, Zibo Ji, Meishan Zhang et al.ACL 2026
  3. PUPPET: Neural-Symbolic Standardized Patients for Mental HealthChen Xu, Yu Ji, Zhenyu Lv, Yang Yi et al.ACL 2026
  4. WikiREVIEW: A Multi-Perspective Review Framework for Automatic Wiki-Style Article GenerationGuo-Biao Zhang, Zhijing Wu, Tian Lan, Ding-Yuan Liu et al.AAAI 2026

Builds on22

  1. Training language models to follow instructions with human feedbackLong Ouyang, Jeffrey Wu, Xu Jiang, Diogo Almeida et al.NeurIPS 2022 · 24,707 citations
  2. Measuring Massive Multitask Language UnderstandingDan Hendrycks, Collin Burns, Steven Basart, Andy Zou et al.ICLR 2021 · 7,905 citations
  3. WinoGrande: An Adversarial Winograd Schema Challenge at ScaleKeisuke Sakaguchi, Ronan Le Bras, Chandra Bhagavatula, Yejin ChoiAAAI 2020 · 3,037 citations
  4. Improving Factuality and Reasoning in Language Models through Multiagent DebateYilun Du, Shuang Li, Antonio Torralba, Joshua B. Tenenbaum et al.ICML 2024 · 1,562 citations
  5. MetaMath: Bootstrap Your Own Mathematical Questions for Large Language ModelsLonghui Yu, Weisen Jiang, Han Shi, Jincheng Yu et al.ICLR 2024 · 637 citations

Related papers

  1. RL4F: Generating Natural Language Feedback with Reinforcement Learning for Repairing Model OutputsAfra Feyza Akyürek, Ekin Akyürek, Ashwin Kalyan, Peter Clark et al.ACL 2023 · 24 citations
  2. CriticEval: Evaluating Large-scale Language Model as CriticTian Lan, Wenwei Zhang, Chen Xu, Heyan Huang et al.NeurIPS 2024 · 26 citations
  3. The Critique of CritiqueShichao Sun, Junlong Li, Weizhe Yuan, Ruifeng Yuan et al.ACL Findings 2024 · 2 citations
  4. Advancing LLM Reasoning with Natural Language and Numerical FeedbackXiaoying Zhang, Yipeng Zhang, Hao Sun, Kaituo Feng et al.ICML 2026 · 79 citations
  5. CritiqueLLM: Towards an Informative Critique Generation Model for Evaluation of Large Language Model GenerationPei Ke, Bosi Wen, Andrew Feng, Xiao Liu et al.ACL 2024 · 9 citations
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